The present embodiments relate to computer assisted detection (CAD). For computer assisted detection, previous discriminative approaches detect objects by testing entire images exhaustively at all locations. Thin-client devices (e.g., personal data assistants, cell phones, or tablet computers) may have the functionality to review medical data remotely, but do not have sufficient processing power and/or memory to rapidly detect from large data sets, such as medical scan data. Instead, CAD is performed on workstations for viewing at the workstation, but network bandwidth may limit performance.
Images may be visualized in a manner to minimize the amount of data to be transmitted. Data representation with a set of progressively increasing resolutions has been previously used to encode geometric meshes and for remote medical image visualization. The representation of images can be realized through the JPEG 2000 standard, which also includes client/server Interactive Protocol (JPIP) for transmitting image regions at desired resolutions using the least bandwidth required. The JPIP protocol is useful for visualizing large DICOM images remotely. The quality of JPEG 2000 images after lossy compression has been previously evaluated for reading radiology datasets.
Operating under bounded bandwidth resources has also been addressed in visual surveillance applications. Typically, these techniques process the two-dimensional images on the server where the cameras are attached. The extracted information, such as extracted regions and detected objects, has much smaller size than the original images and can be transmitted efficiently over a wide-area network. However, two-dimensional images require less bandwidth and less computational power. Detection in three-dimensional data sets may be more difficult and require greater transmission bandwidth.